Looking forward to 2008, we look back at what happened with Aramis Ramirez in 2007. His stats were: 72/26/101/.310. Not numbers that killed your team, but, for where you had to draft him, he definitely didn’t produce numbers that made you happy. In fact, Adrian Beltre finished ahead of him on our PLAYER RATER (explanation of our player rater HERE). Aramis’s 26 home runs were his lowest total since 2002 when he hit a paltry 18. So what happened?

On April 13th, 2007, this is what was reported by ESPN:

Third baseman Aramis Ramirez, one of the Chicago Cubs’ hottest hitters during the first eight games, was out of the lineup with a swollen right wrist Friday and was sent to a hand specialist to be examined.

As we’ve seen time and again, wrist injuries completely zap the power from hitters — I’m talking to you, Derrek Lee. Then to compound matters in June, Aramis hit the DL with knee tendonitis. Hard to say when the pain subsided, but his numbers look like he was playing through injury for a while. He had only six home runs combined in June, July and August. His batting eye, though, never wavered, batting nearly .340 for those months. So what can be expected for 2008?

Well, wrist injuries linger — I’m talking to you, Hideki Matsui, through a translator, of course — yet there was an extremely promising sign for Aramis’s 2008 campaign. In September of ‘07, Aramis hit 8 of his 26 home runs, a sign that his power was already returning as the season drew to a close. With some extra R & R in the offseason (Aramis seems like a deep-sea fisherman to me), he should be back to swatting home runs in the friendly confines. While your leaguemates look at Aramis’s ’07 numbers and pass him by on draft day, you can draft him with confidence as a rebound is in order.